1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to datacenter management systems and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for facilitating application recovery using configuration information.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a typical computing environment (e.g., a datacenter), administrators and/or users desire highly available applications and quick recovery of host computers after a disaster (e.g., power failure, hurricane and/or the like). Various software programs (e.g., an application) as well as one or more hardware devices (e.g., a server, an array, a switch, a firewall and/or the like) are employed to provide data and application services to client computers.
Current disaster recovery systems (e.g., SYMANTEC NetBackUp Bare Metal Recovery (NBU-BMR)) store a backup of the host computer (e.g., a physical machine or a virtual machine). When a hardware failure or software fault occurs that disables the host computer, these current disaster recovery systems provisions a bare metal server to restore operations at the host computer or another host computer. Generally, the bare metal server is a computer that does not contain an operating system or any software applications. The bare-metal server may be a computer in which a virtual machine is installed directly on computer hardware rather than within the host operating system (OS). The bare metal server provisioned with an appropriate operating system, application software, file data and a host computer configuration. Configurations associated with the various hardware devices and/or software programs are backed up regularly to facilitate restoration of one or more hardware and/or software programs during a failure.
Currently, various recovery techniques (i.e., Bare Metal Host Recovery (BMR) and/or the like) are employed, but such techniques are restricted to recovering an entire host computer but not an application that is running on the host computer. In addition, an application configuration simply includes configuration information that only the application may view and/or comprehend. For example, a database name and location, among other application specific parameters, are of significance from the application perspective but not from the file system, logical volume, LUN and/or a zone on which a storage device associated with the database is assigned.
Disaster recovery techniques for host computers are not flexible and are unable to assure a full application recovery in an efficient manner. For instance, the host may operate three instances of a database application and each instance uses different volumes to storage data. If such host is restored using current techniques, then the new host is configured with all three database instances, but the new host may not have a sufficient amount of storage resources to operate all three database instances. In other words, the current techniques are unable to recover an instance of an application. For example, restoration of only one of the three database instances and any associated volumes is impossible using the current techniques.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for facilitating application recovery in a datacenter using configuration information.